I recently had a encounter with AI of the worst kind. I wanted to send a link to a New York statute. Google brought up a site that I have used before. I clicked.
And what I got was NOT the page with the statute. I got an AI summary of the statute. Thank you browser. It wasn't anything that had a link I could copy and paste.
I had to go to the website that actually has the statutes and then search IT for the statute I wanted. Luckily THAT brought me up the actual link that I could copy and paste.
“We need our top media scholars to study how almost everybody, almost everywhere is somehow doing a bad job at journalism and refuses to adapt to the internet and is also getting worse at making decisions all at the same time.” - say more? Operationalize this for me a bit? (I like to think I do a little of this but … the refusal to adapt to the internet I see less of, generally).
I guess I should clarify that I was being (very) arch in that passage; the widespread and international decline of professional journalism to me is not the product of a few hedge funds or a few top editors or the failure of a single medium, but the side effects of a much broader transformation in how consumers obtain and interact with information of all kinds, not just journalism. To borrow an analogy from another field of crisis: We should be talking about the number and greater intensity of devastating hurricanes as a product of climate, not of weather.
totally! to me, it's not even about journalism, it's about the survival of some sort of coherent agreement on what civic life ought to look like. Anyway.
I recently had a encounter with AI of the worst kind. I wanted to send a link to a New York statute. Google brought up a site that I have used before. I clicked.
And what I got was NOT the page with the statute. I got an AI summary of the statute. Thank you browser. It wasn't anything that had a link I could copy and paste.
I had to go to the website that actually has the statutes and then search IT for the statute I wanted. Luckily THAT brought me up the actual link that I could copy and paste.
In addition to the obvious problems, that sounds bad for anyone who needs to include a citation to a web page.
It may not surprise you to learn that gen AI rot is already starting to creep into academic papers: https://www.popsci.com/technology/ai-generated-text-scientific-journals/
I am not surprised (but am saddened).
“We need our top media scholars to study how almost everybody, almost everywhere is somehow doing a bad job at journalism and refuses to adapt to the internet and is also getting worse at making decisions all at the same time.” - say more? Operationalize this for me a bit? (I like to think I do a little of this but … the refusal to adapt to the internet I see less of, generally).
I guess I should clarify that I was being (very) arch in that passage; the widespread and international decline of professional journalism to me is not the product of a few hedge funds or a few top editors or the failure of a single medium, but the side effects of a much broader transformation in how consumers obtain and interact with information of all kinds, not just journalism. To borrow an analogy from another field of crisis: We should be talking about the number and greater intensity of devastating hurricanes as a product of climate, not of weather.
totally! to me, it's not even about journalism, it's about the survival of some sort of coherent agreement on what civic life ought to look like. Anyway.